Albufeira Marina

We must have had a long day yesterday. Izzy slept until after 9am. That’s a full 2 hours later than her normal “lie in”.

Kas went for an early run down to Galé Beach, where we’d had lunch the previous day, and I stayed in with the girls trying to get them to eat some breakfast, but it was obvious from an early stage that they had other things on their minds. Wet things. Right outside the apartment things. Things involving a swimming pool. So I pretty much gave up on trying to get them to eat and just let them get ready for swimming.

So we all spent the morning lazing by the pool, taking a dip, drying out in the sun, getting sunburned and generally doing as little as we could get away with. I, for one, was not even remotely bothered about this lack of activity, as a result of me having had far too much beer in much to short a time the previous night.

Eventually we had a quick lunch at the apartment and then packed ourselves up for a trip into Albufeira. There wasn’t really much of a plan. And it showed.

We drove down through the marina area, and, not having made a plan, we didn’t know where there was any parking. So we went up the hill towards the town centre around the marina and ended up right in the middle of some very small streets with one-way systems and really steep hills. I’m not sure Kas appreciated the test of her ability to drive a left-hand drive car so early on in the holiday.

Still, she managed to get us out again without hitting anything, and we found ourselves back at the marina again. We saw a bit of a car park down at the marina reception so we drove down there. (Hindsight says that the massive underground car park with 3 hours free parking is a better option, but we were newbies).

We walked along a bit of jetty down to a flat area that contained a) a geocache and b) a bunch of little huts belonging to vendors of various boat-based activities (parasailing, dolphin spotting, and so on). These looked interesting but we were also aware that the tour rep would be offering us the same kinds of thing, so we skipped it for now and went for a cache.

All the hard work of walking 500 yards in the sunshine had taken its toll, so we retired to the first available café and grabbed an ice cream and a bit of shade.

After ice creams we felt strong enough to walk up the steps and find another cache at the nearby church.

Having successfully found the cache and bhaving been surprised by someone driving their car right up to where we were searching, even though it didn’t look remotely like a road, we decided we’d call it a day, so we walked back down to the marina and grabbed a few flyers / had a chat with the lady at one of the boat-trip places before driving back towards home. We had limited time anyway because we needed to stop at Spar again for more food and we had an appointment with our tour rep at JK’s Bar at 4pm.

There wasn’t a lot to be said really – just a few excursions, which helped us make our own self-drive “shopping list” and a few basics about the resort. I guess we’re used to self-organised travel so the concept of having a tour rep to “look after” us is a bit alien now.

We had pizzas for tea, followed by a healthy pudding of crisps. While we were making it the girls stole another hour or so in the pool. It’s getting to be a habit.

As the sun was setting on the day the girls were still outside playing with some of the other kids in the complex. At some point Izzy managed to fall into the pool whilst fully dressed. The actual details of the incident seem sketchy. She might have tripped. She might have been pushed. She might have over-balanced whilst trying to fish something out. She got a nice graze on her stomach to show for it.

This was enough for one day, so we got Izzy to bed, and afterwards I sat with Ami and did a few of my puzzles whilst drinking some more beer.